02-10-2004, 05:47 PM
Building a box from scratch is not too tough, though the first time I did it, I had heard so many warnings about static electricity I was scared to death I'd fry the motherboard by just looking at it funny. (I didn't, at least not then; it was a few years later that it started smoking at power on.) I've built 3 systems over the past few years and now I have boxes of spare parts and cables, feh.
Anyway; what I'd advise for the true beginner is to buy a pre-assembled barebones box (case, power supply, motherboard, CPU, fans/heatsink) from some onlinewarehouser then haunt pricewatch and/or ebay and/or Best Buy for good prices on hardware you want. There are differences between the way the AMD and Intel processors run, but let's put it this way; if you don't know what those differences are already, chances are they won't affect you and you don't need to. For the record, I don't either. AMD is usually cheaper for a given performance level (clock speed is no longer the sole measurement of performance).
The absolute minimum hardware you need for boot is the above plus cdrom drive OR floppy drive (both won't hurt) RAM (agreed with artega, 512MB is pretty much the minimum you want these days), video card (something like a NVIDIA Ti series is cheap and plenty good enough for the next couple years), hard drive (brand is pretty irrelevant, 80GB is nice, 40GB is cheaper) and an OS with boot disk (WinXP [the only OS you're going to be able to buy off the shelf] should be a bootable cd, so if you set the motherboard bios to boot from cd, you won't need a floppy at all).
As well as the old keyboard, mouse, monitor combo (all sold seperately). The nice thing is that if you alreay have a computer, you can cannibalize it for parts you can use, cdrom, floppy, hd and peripherals can all be swapped. Sound card, modem, dvd etc. optional.
The drives, if you're buying them new, will have really badly done instructions with mostly pictures and a few cryptic lines of text in 8 different languages telling you how to physically install them. Not too hard, but it will take some interpretation in spots (don't forget to ground yourself before touching the hardware by touching the plugged in metal case). There are also dozens of tech help sites strung across the web; google your particular problem with hardware and you'll get hundreds of hits.
Now that I think about it, you will need a boot floppy to format the hard drive before installing the OS. Create one with your old box and use it for the new box. It should have fdisk.exe on it. Run that, create your partitions, set one active, then format. Then you can reset the bios to boot from cd for the OS install. I swear, it's not as hard as I'm making it sound.
Whenever I'm in the market for buying new hardware, I do heavy duty surfing of tech sites to find a consensus on particularly good models, then I search for them. It's some work, but in the end I'm pretty confident I'm getting the best upgrade for my money. Good luck.
Anyway; what I'd advise for the true beginner is to buy a pre-assembled barebones box (case, power supply, motherboard, CPU, fans/heatsink) from some onlinewarehouser then haunt pricewatch and/or ebay and/or Best Buy for good prices on hardware you want. There are differences between the way the AMD and Intel processors run, but let's put it this way; if you don't know what those differences are already, chances are they won't affect you and you don't need to. For the record, I don't either. AMD is usually cheaper for a given performance level (clock speed is no longer the sole measurement of performance).
The absolute minimum hardware you need for boot is the above plus cdrom drive OR floppy drive (both won't hurt) RAM (agreed with artega, 512MB is pretty much the minimum you want these days), video card (something like a NVIDIA Ti series is cheap and plenty good enough for the next couple years), hard drive (brand is pretty irrelevant, 80GB is nice, 40GB is cheaper) and an OS with boot disk (WinXP [the only OS you're going to be able to buy off the shelf] should be a bootable cd, so if you set the motherboard bios to boot from cd, you won't need a floppy at all).
As well as the old keyboard, mouse, monitor combo (all sold seperately). The nice thing is that if you alreay have a computer, you can cannibalize it for parts you can use, cdrom, floppy, hd and peripherals can all be swapped. Sound card, modem, dvd etc. optional.
The drives, if you're buying them new, will have really badly done instructions with mostly pictures and a few cryptic lines of text in 8 different languages telling you how to physically install them. Not too hard, but it will take some interpretation in spots (don't forget to ground yourself before touching the hardware by touching the plugged in metal case). There are also dozens of tech help sites strung across the web; google your particular problem with hardware and you'll get hundreds of hits.
Now that I think about it, you will need a boot floppy to format the hard drive before installing the OS. Create one with your old box and use it for the new box. It should have fdisk.exe on it. Run that, create your partitions, set one active, then format. Then you can reset the bios to boot from cd for the OS install. I swear, it's not as hard as I'm making it sound.
Whenever I'm in the market for buying new hardware, I do heavy duty surfing of tech sites to find a consensus on particularly good models, then I search for them. It's some work, but in the end I'm pretty confident I'm getting the best upgrade for my money. Good luck.